THE TEST OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN ARGENTINA
In the early months of the administration, four military dictatorships—Brazil, Argentina, El Salvador, and Guatemala—angered by the State Department’s report on human rights violations, took the extraordinary step of rejecting U.S. military assistance funds, which decreased our leverage over them. We kept the policy from being a blunderbuss by withholding loans in our own aid program and the World Bank’s when they were not focused directly on alleviating poverty. Progress was incremental, but real. When U.S. officials visited military dictatorships, they also met with opposition groups, which had been forbidden in the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger era. In Argentina and Paraguay hundreds of political prisoners were released, although thousands more remained.71 Chile announced a broad amnesty for political prisoners and asserted that no “disappearances” had been reported.72
To support nongovernmental groups, Vance met with Martin Ennals, secretary-general of Amnesty International, and complimented the organization, which had won a Nobel Peace Prize for its human rights work.73 The State Department hosted a two-day conference for five hundred representatives of such organizations, the first ever held by the U.S. government. They were appreciative, but still criticized our military support to countries engaged in serious human rights violations.74
Of all the tough challenges to Carter’s Latin American human rights policy, dealing with Argentina was the most difficult. Argentina is a large country heavily endowed with natural resources and self-sufficient in oil. Its capital, Buenos Aires, one of the most beautiful in the world, was the visible result of Argentina’s great prosperity, until it came under populist misrule in the middle of the twentieth century and moved toward gross violations of human rights.
During the 1970s the military fought what became known as the “dirty war” against leftists, which they justified as “the first war on terrorism.” But the scope of their battle went far beyond radicals and targeted wholesale numbers of moderate-to-liberal political opponents. The ruling junta, which had taken control in a 1976 coup, unleashed its security forces and murdered thousands of innocent people, including priests and nuns; children were taken away from their parents, and in many cases their whereabouts are still unknown.75
One favorite form of murder by the military junta was to drop prisoners from airplanes into the broad La Plata Estuary leading to the capital, or to bury them in unmarked graves. The anonymous victims were known in Spanish as los desaparecidos—the disappeared. One expert who reviewed the documents of the Argentine intelligence battalion chiefly responsible estimated that between 1975 and the middle of 1976, some 22,000 people were killed and 4,000 others disappeared.76
Recently declassified documents77 show that Kissinger and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller overrode the human rights concerns of the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires to green-light an acceleration of the war against subversion by the country’s new military rulers, leading to an increase in the number of deaths and disappearances during the last months of the Ford administration in 1976. From 1976 to 1982, about three hundred detention camps were established as sites for torture and murder, and to this day there is no way of knowing the number of victims, with estimates ranging from 30,000 to 50,000. In response, in 1977, Carter’s first year in office, Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, named after the central square in Buenos Aires, was formed by mothers who had lost husbands or children to the death squads. Every Thursday they marched around the Plaza, in front of Casa Rosada, the presidential palace, demanding to know the fate of their loved ones.
Three weeks after Carter was inaugurated, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher met with the senior Argentine official in Washington and told him that while the administration understood Argentina had a serious terrorist problem, it was deeply concerned about torture, witch hunts against opponents, and other gross violations of human rights.78
By the end of February the administration cut in half the Ford administration’s annual military aid request for Argentina, accompanying the budget request with criticism of the country’s human rights record. Negotiations were halted on credits for previously approved military funds, and deliveries of equipment and training agreements slowed. The Carter administration also began to use its voice and vote to curb lending to Argentina by international financial organizations. Angered by the new administration’s human rights policy, Argentina announced it would not take up any of its foreign military sales credits for the coming year.79
Allen “Tex” Harris, a newly arrived foreign service officer, became a human rights hero on the ground in the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, working under Derian’s unique instructions to follow human rights developments closely and maintain close contacts with dissidents, labor leaders, journalists, and the Roman Catholic Church. The embassy opened its doors to victims and their relatives. Every two weeks the embassy also released a regular human rights update, and staffers became experts on the structure of the repressive apparatus, compiling a remarkable database of nearly 10,000 victims, most of whom had disappeared without warrant or public notice.80
Senior members of the military junta argued to Harris that they were “spearheading the fight against godless communism” and were not only protecting their own country but “Western civilization itself from the ravages of communism.” Harris, far from being persuaded, later was given the State Department’s highest award for his work exposing their kidnapping, torture, and murder.81
Carter could not avoid meeting with the Argentine ruler, Jorge Videla, when he joined other heads of state to witness the signing of the Panama Canal Treaties in Washington. Pastor and Brzezinski urged the president to invite only the heads of democracies to avoid according an Oval Office meeting to the head of a brutal regime, but Carter believed in meeting with everyone despite the mixed signals that sent. Carter said he found Videla “calm, strong, competent, sure of himself enough to admit Argentina does have problems in the eyes of the world.”
Videla promised him that Argentina would finally sign the ten-year-old treaty making Latin America a nuclear-free continent. Carter pressed him on human rights and made a special plea for Jacobo Timerman, a pro-Israel newspaper publisher who later became famous as a prisoner of conscience with his 1981 memoir, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number.82 Videla promised Carter to resolve all pending cases by the end of the year and to release many of the four thousand detained without trial under executive decree.83
Carter’s plea reinforced those of senior members of his administration, especially Patt Derian, who made a game-changing visit to Buenos Aires, publicly criticizing the regime and championing the cause of Timerman and other human rights advocates.84 Timerman credited her and Carter with saving his life and many others’.
But frankly the publicity Videla generated out of his White House visit was worth more than the concessions Carter extracted from him. For the better part of a year, Videla played a cat-and-mouse game, releasing a few hundred prisoners at a time, and promising to admit a Human Rights Commission of the Organization of American States. But thousands remained in detention, and the commission was never admitted. Although arms deliveries trickled through, they were finally banned starting on September 30, 1978, by a bill the president signed, sponsored by Senators Kennedy and Humphrey. Unfortunately the law was so restrictive that Brzezinski’s deputy, David Aaron, complained, “Even if they all became saints tomorrow, we could never resume assistance, because it’s been cut off for all time; you have a stick but no carrot—not a very good situation.”85
Relations with Argentina settled into a nasty stalemate, which was finally broken by war after Carter left the White House. On April 2, 1982, the Argentine junta invaded the small archipelago it claimed as Las Malvinas, which since 1841 had been an English-speaking colony of Britain known as the Falkland Islands. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Britain retaliated in a long-range amphibious attack, secretly aided by American intelligence, and annihilated the Argentine force.
The hated Argentine junta had overreached and was brought down in humiliation by huge public protests.
It took a number of years for Carter’s human rights policy to produce lasting change in Latin America, but it came as surely as day follows even the darkest of nights. In November 1983, almost exactly three years to the day from Jimmy Carter’s crushing defeat, Raúl Alfonsín won a stunning election restoring democracy to Argentina, and declared that Carter’s human rights policy saved thousands of lives in Argentina, possibly including his own.86 Other Latin American military dictatorships that Carter confronted with his human rights policy—Brazil, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, El Salvador, Bolivia, Honduras, Guatemala, Uruguay—also became democracies, with much higher standards of human rights for their citizens, as validated by America’s most respected career diplomat, Thomas Pickering.87
The same cannot be said of Nicaragua, where the Somoza regime was overturned by the pro-Communist Sandinistas led by Daniel Ortega, who was nevertheless defeated in a free election monitored by former president Carter and the Carter Center and later returned to power through the ballot box. But because of the strength of the democracies that Carter helped develop throughout Latin America, Ortega is isolated, has cast aside his hard-core Marxism, and presents no danger to his neighbors.
For me, the terrible numbers of those murdered and tortured by Latin dictators took on a personal dimension when I served as U.S. ambassador to the European Union in Brussels during the Clinton administration. There, Fran and I became good friends with the Argentine ambassador, Diego Guelar, whose story gave meaning to the suffering of the era and how much Carter and his team did to change it. Guelar was born on a ranch in the Entre Ríos Province, about 400 miles from Buenos Aires, in an area purchased by Baron Moritz von Hirsch, a German Jewish philanthropist, to finance the first wave of Russian Jews escaping persecution in their czarist homeland. His grandfather arrived in 1885 and became a Jewish gaucho on an Argentine cattle ranch. Guelar won a scholarship in 1966 from the American Field Service, lived in upstate New York, and returned home to graduate from law school in Buenos Aires in 1970. He became involved in a peaceful prodemocracy group opposing the military regime; containing a mixture of Christian Democrats, Jews, and some Marxists, it was outlawed by the government. A paramilitary unit wrecked his small apartment, and he went into hiding from 1971 until 1973, when the ailing former dictator, 82-year-old Juan Perón, returned from exile in Spain and was elected president for a third time.
With Cuban forces active in the region, anti-Communist, anti-Castro military regimes took over in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia. Guelar, like many young people in Latin America, while initially attracted by the Cuban revolution, soon came to see that he and his young friends were being used by the Soviet Union to export the Cold War to Latin America. His life got even more precarious, as he and his law partner received death threats. His law partner went into exile with his family, but Guelar, then 25 years old, decided to stay and run for Congress. Shortly afterward he reaped his reward: Two cars pulled up next to him while he was driving just in front of his law firm, and assailants put 23 bullets into his car. He miraculously survived but went underground a second time, living with false documents until the end of 1981.
When he came out of hiding, he was elected to the Argentine Congress three times, and a democratically elected president made him ambassador to Brazil, the European Union, and then to the United States. In Washington, Fran and I were among those invited to the Argentine Embassy’s first kosher barbecue to celebrate the end of the 70-year ban on the import of Argentine beef. In 2016 he became Argentina’s ambassador to China. Guelar reflected: “I’m not sure President Carter is aware of how many people’s lives were saved thanks to his policy, [but] I can tell you that thousands of people’s lives were saved thanks to Carter.” The positive relationships built up between the United States and Latin America, he believes, would have been impossible without the Carter policy symbolized by the Panama Canal Treaty, “which is really the cornerstone of the relation between the United States and Latin America.” Carter, he said, changed the perception of the United States for millions of Latin Americans, ending what for many was the “idea of the imperial and unjust power of the United States.”88
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THE SOVIET UNION
Jimmy Carter came into office with the Cold War at full steam. Soviet power was restrained at the geographic limits created at the dawn of the postwar era by a policy known as containment—the United States and its NATO allies holding the line against Communist expansion until, as indeed finally happened, the Communist vision of the future collapsed from its own internal contradictions and Western solidarity. In the 1970s Moscow had firm control over its Eastern European satellite states and was promoting Communism in Western European countries, especially Spain and Italy, where a local variety known as Eurocommunism had strong public support, especially among intellectuals, because liberal reform parties had been stifled by the extreme right through much of the Cold War.1
The Soviets were using Cuban surrogate troops in Africa to foment Communist revolutions. Their military buildup coincided with and was partly induced by the slackening of America’s appetite and ability to fight wars abroad after the defeat and disillusion in Vietnam. Moscow had reaped economic and political benefits from détente in the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger era, in which they were regarded as adversaries but equals. The Communists felt that history was on their side.
HUMAN RIGHTS AND SOFT POWER
But in a sharp and profound break with Nixon-Ford-Kissinger realpolitik, Carter was the first American president to make human rights a central feature of his foreign policy, applying it to military dictatorships in Latin America and to the Soviet Union. For him human rights abroad were the other side of the coin of civil rights at home. Just as he was deeply opposed to the segregation of his native South, he did not want to stand by idly when civil rights were abused abroad, even by some of our friends, particularly in Latin America. As he put it to me: “It was kind of an idealistic thing, and Cy Vance was right in bed with me on that. I can’t say Brzezinski was. He wasn’t against it, but it was something that I ordained almost unilaterally.”2
For Carter human rights were not only a morality play. Brzezinski helped marry the moral dimension of human rights with a strategic vision to create a tool to challenge the basis of the repressive Soviet system. Carter envisioned a foreign policy grounded in human rights as an instrument in the raging Cold War to compete more effectively with the Soviet Union for support in the developing world, and as a guiding philosophy reflecting the best ideals of the United States and its Western allies against the soft Soviet underbelly. He meant to exploit it by championing the rights of its oppressed citizens, particularly democratic dissidents and Soviet Jews.
Since the founding of the Republic, the United States has presented its face to the world in alternate directions emblazoned in the Great Seal of the United States depicting an eagle with one talon gripping an olive branch, while the other held together thirteen arrows representing the hand of might of the original thirteen colonies. During the Cold War, Carter embraced this dichtonomy by appointing a negotiator and diplomat (Vance) as his secretary of state; a hard-line anti-Communist (Brzezinski) as his White House national security adviser; and a brilliant, tough-minded scientist (Brown) to run the Pentagon. Carter struggled in the first half of his administration to blend their often conflicting views into one consistent national security policy. His offer of the olive branch to the USSR met its limits in Afghanistan, when Carter seemed surprised by the aggressive nature of Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union. Unfortunately, his admission of surprise at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan overshadowed his steady strengthening of America’s defense capability and the defenses of our European allies, as might be expected from a former officer of the U.S. Navy.
He was unfairly accused of waving only the olive branch, while in fact he spent four years improving and expanding th
e nation’s quiver of arrows. Carter reversed the post-Vietnam decline in military spending with average annual real increases of about 3 percent to help rebuild our forces. He proposed an expanded spending plan of 5 percent annual increases starting in 1980, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and persuaded our NATO allies to pledge 3 percent of their annual economic output on their own military forces. Carter also persuaded the Europeans to accept American medium-range missiles on their territory as a counterweight to the Soviets’ new SS-20 mobile missiles. He initiated the Stealth technology, which remains a crucial element of U.S. national security today. He negotiated a second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty—known as SALT II—which arrested the Soviet nuclear buildup. Even though it was never ratified by the Senate, it was nevertheless followed by both parties in their mutual interest. And for a variety of reasons, specifically their own excesses—and creative diplomacy, led by the American ambassador to Italy, Richard Gardner—Western European Communist parties began to fade.
In Asia, Carter built on Nixon’s opening to China by normalizing diplomatic relations with Beijing, a strategic counterweight to the Soviet Union, over the vigorous objections of the American lobby for the Chinese Nationalists on Taiwan, meanwhile creating an enduring cultural and defense relationship through the Taiwan Relations Act, which protects Taiwan against a military attack by China.3 Despite fits and starts—Carter’s cancellation of the B-1 bomber and a bungled attempt to deploy the neutron bomb in Europe—this is a record of which to be proud, one that hardly anyone appreciates today.
President Carter Page 71
